To respond to recent calls for examining oral fluency from a broader social and communicative perspective, the current study aimed at investigating the effects of task communicative function on second language (L2) and first language (L1) speakers' fluency. Designing tasks that represent three different communicative functions (congratulations,…

This study examines a 30-item Spanish elicited imitation task (EIT) as a measure of global language proficiency for heritage language (HL) learners of Spanish. Results from Rasch modeling suggest that, while EIT scores demonstrated excellent reliability, the ability of much of the HL sample far exceeded the difficulty of the items. Differential…

This study addressed the language in professional communication and national identity of civil servants-bilinguals in the Ukrainian border oblasts with Russia. It was empirically determined that the civil servants mainly use the Ukrainian language in professional communication with the users of civil services, but with colleagues, the Russian…

This article responds to calls for greater inclusivity in second language acquisition research and, more specifically, to calls to explore further the impact of first language literacy on second language oracy (e.g., Tarone et al., 2009). We conducted a partial replication of Foster and Skehan's (1996) influential study of task complexity,…

Previous work has shown that English native speakers interpret sentences as predicted by a noisy-channel model: They integrate both the real-world plausibility of the meaning--the prior--and the likelihood that the intended sentence may be corrupted into the perceived sentence. In this study, we test the noisy-channel model in Mandarin Chinese, a…

The purpose of this corpus-based study is a bottom-up investigation of strategic devices used by heritage language speakers (HLSs) during narration and conversation. It offers a critical review of compensation/communication strategy definitions and classifications, and presents the results of an investigation into strategies employed by an…

The question of whether lexical decomposition is driven by semantic transparency in the lexical processing of morphologically complex words, such as compounds, remains controversial. Prior research on compound processing has predominantly examined visual processing. Focusing instead on spoken word word recognition, the present study examined the…

We examined what causes L1-L2 differences in sensitivity to prominence cues in discourse processing. Participants listened to recorded stories in segment-by-segment fashion at their own pace. Each story established a pair of contrasting items, and one item from the pair was rementioned and manipulated to carry either a contrastive or…

This study is the first attempt to explore the relationship between rater variables focusing on raters' language aptitude and their judgments of second language (L2) speech. Thirty-four English listeners rated 65 spontaneous native and nonnative speech samples for comprehensibility, accentedness, and fluency. They also completed the LLAMA language…

Purpose: The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has prompted changes to child assessment procedures in schools such as the use of face masks by assessors. Research with adults suggests that face masks diminish performance on speech processing and comprehension tasks, yet little is known about how assessor masking affects child performance. Therefore, we…

The science of reading (SOR) refers to the sum of what we know about how people learn to read based on empirical studies across multiple disciplines. The purpose of this review was to identify research evidence to inform the SOR for multilingual learners (MLs). We reviewed 30 systematic reviews related to reading and reading instruction for MLs…

This action research study aimed to improve reading with understanding in a lower primary classroom in Fiji. Five emergent readers were selected through an examination of class running records. Peer observation, student worksheets, and class running records were utilized to collect data. The data analysis revealed that when teachers implement…

Possessive determiners (PDs) "his" and "her" are challenging for L2 learners to acquire, and this difficulty has been attributed to several factors, including negative L1 transfer effects (White et al., 2007). What researchers have not yet considered is how PDs are acquired by learners whose L1 predicts positive transfer…

This article discusses the dynamic nature of childhood bilingualism by analyzing oral speech from returnee heritage speakers (HSs) of Portuguese, who grew up in Germany, but moved to Portugal in childhood/adolescence. The first dataset from 14 speakers showed that the length of exposure to German predicted the rate of (in)accurate production of…

We investigated the acquisition of Hindi split ergativity (zero or "-ne" marking) and Hindi differential object marking (DOM; zero or "-ko" marking) by L1 speakers of Dutch. Both grammatical phenomena are conditioned by multiple syntactic and semantic features. On a descriptive level, the study aims to examine when and how…